Sprigginflints

Description

There are five Sprigginflints, just as there were five Grackleflints.  Being the sons of Emil Grackleflint, now known as the Pale Incanter, they share some of his characteristics, such as pallid grey skin and a small atavistic elbow spike.  (Emil strangled their anonymous mother.)
 
They wear skater style-clothes (black knit caps, t-shirts, baggy pants) and ride sky-boards similar to snow boards.  Each Sprigginflint wears a different color shirt, which is the only way to tell them apart.  The green-shirted Sprigginflint is Sigmund, or Sig, who is their leader and is usually the one who talks with Emil.  The blue one is Iggy, or Ignatz.  The yellow one is Ick, or Ichabod.  The red one is Fonse, or Alfonse.  The orange one is Max, or Maximillian.  (At one point early on, before Max is otherwise named in the comic, Sigmund calls him "Polly"; this seems to be a mistake.)
 
They are noticeably disrespectful to their father, as he was in turn to his father, the Umbra Sprite.  They speak in a broken, barely literate street style of English, swearing copiously.

History

The Sprigginflints are first employed by their father to track down the location of the heroes, Joe Phat, Kirby Hero, and especially Kevin Matchstick, Emil's nemesis.  They find them, but after the heroes hook up with Wally Ut, the Sprigginflints lose them.  Whereas Mirth was a magical beacon that attracted the attention of the forces of darkness, Wally automatically takes them off their radar screen, so to speak.
 

They finally find them again in the house of Isis.  The heroes are in a magic trance, and so Isis' husband, Bartholomew Gretch, goes out to fight them.  He manages to hold them off for a while, but then they all attack at once, biting him and holding on, and their poison takes him down.  The other heroes run out and skirmish with the Sprigs, driving them off.  All this time, Sigmund is the one who communicates with their father.
 
Ich and "Polly" (really Max) supervise a sneak attack on Kevin and Kirby.  They send a pack of hell-hounds after them, which remind him of the Hounds that belong to the Master of the Hunt.  This memory of the original Hounds increases Kevin's feelings of doubt and guilt.  However, he and Kirby defeat the hell-hounds, and the Sprigs, who were watching, fly off.
 

Emil grows increasingly impatient with his sons' lackluster results (just as the Umbra Sprite was impatient with the Grackleflints), but sends them after the heroes once again.  They first find a Bogart, a small mole-like faerie, and are about to attack it when the heroes intervene.  This time the heroes make a dent in the Sprigginflints' ranks: Kevin kills Ichabod with the Bat's energy blast, and the newly-arrive Presbyter catches Fonse.  They interrogate him.  At first he won't reply, because he's more scared of the Incanter than he is of them.  But the Presbyter uses his hypnotic stare to get him to talk, and he gives up the fact that the Incanter is really Emil.  After getting the information they need, the heroes destroy Fonse.
 
The remaining Sprigs later re-try their gambit with the hell-hounds, this time having them mimic the true Hounds' voices of Kevin's dead friends to make him feel even more guilty.  However it is essentially only a hit-an-run operation and they fly away again.
 

The heroes finally invade Emil's faerie kingdom, and the Sprigs try to roll a huge boulder down onto Kirby.  Kevin pushes himself out of the way, and is trapped himself, but Kirby manages to lift it off.  The heroes get into the center of the kingdom, and Emil sets the Man-Mountain of Dzoxk on them.  Emil then tells the Sprigginflints to help, but they refuse out of cowardice.  The Pale Incanter then blasts Max, killing him, a sight that inspires the other two to join the battle.  After they get in a short fight against Joe Phat, Kevin casually takes them both out in one swing.
 
Wally Ut manages to entrap Emil in a magic prison, but Emil uses his powers to send a snake over to the body of Sigmund.  The snake crawls into Sigmund through his mouth and controls his mind.  Sigmund picks Emil's staff up off the ground and uses it to pop  the bubble of his prison.  The resulting energies incinerate Sigmund, which is the end of the Sprigginflints.

Powers and Abilities

The Sprigginflints can fly on their sky-boards.  Their elbow spurs are not poisonous, but their teeth are.  The combined bites of all the Sprigginflints were enough to take down the giant, Bartholomew Gretch.  Otherwise we do not see them actually bite anyone.  However it can be assumed that their poison is approximately as dangerous as Grackleflint spur poison.
 
They do not seem like particularly good fighters, being beaten by the heroes fairly easily each time, and usually flying away to safety.  Their usual style is more to harass than battle.
 
They do not have individual powers as the Grackleflints did.